You are ignoring how Trump works. When he is ignored, he doesn’t just stop. He escalates. He threatens. This is a guy who said nukes weren’t off the table, and wants us to rev up our nuclear program in response to Russia’s. Trump is vindictive. If you become his enemy, he does what he can to make you pay.
If he feels he’s being ignored by the international community, I fully expect him to use the might and power of the United States to make them listen. That is how he “makes deals.” Sure, we can hope that every World Leader will be able to pretend to listen while still ultimately ignoring him, but there’s a big chance they won’t.
Yes, Trump is a bit less likely to put a conservative on the Supreme Court, but not because he’s against conservatism. He could just as easily put in someone else who is incompetent, which isn’t good, either.
As for laws, yeah, he’s a little less likely to bend over. But look at what he did with all his executive departments. He appointed people who want to dismantle them. That’s conservatism. Sure seems he’s rolling over.
So you get a slightly less conservative President, but a bigger chance that horrible things happen. Pence is better.
Hard to say. Pence is monstrous, but he is probably going to be pulling strings behind the scenes, while Trump circles around and around with his pants down, crapping on pictures of his enemies. Perhaps Pence or someone can stop him from nuking N. Korea? I dunno. I loathe both of them. Seems Pence is winning here, though.
grits teeth Mike Pence. He would be a bad president, but bad within normal parameters. Donald Trump presents a higher risk of catastrophically bad outcomes, and nothing I imagine Pence doing is that bad.
Now, granted, #3 is a biggy. But realistically we’re just going to see #1 and #2 and neither really lets the President do anything.
A President can have power, by being able to sell the legislature on a particular vision. But that’s not something he has by default. If they aren’t sold, he’s stuck sitting in an office vetoing everything, and that’s just not a power that you really need to fear.
Despite all fear mongering, the Presidential office is almost a powerless role. You only really need to fear the guy who can sell our college-educated Legislature on policy. That’s outside of Trump’s talents.
Um, what? :dubious: The President is in charge of numerous federal departments, with millions of employees, who oversee everything from federal law enforcement, to immigration policy, to energy policy, to international diplomacy, to health care policy, to homeland security, etc. That’s a huge amount of power, even if he can’t create new laws or set the budget.
Not if they all ignore him, because he’s an idiot.
As I said, once everyone realizes that they’ve been had, they’ll have to choose whether to actually drive things into ruin, or just continue doing their job to the best extent, either ignoring or selectively modifying anything that came from Trump into something reasonable. You only have to tough it out for four years, and there’s no reason not to do that once you’ve realized that everyone else is coming to that conclusion as well.
“Lame duck President” is a term for a reason. If the state of being was impossible, we wouldn’t have a phrase for it.
Trump over Pence for me. Not an obvious choice but I think there are enough checks in place to precent an actual nuclear whoopsie by tweet.
“Every decision on trade, on taxes, on immigration, on foreign affairs will be made to benefit American workers and American families,”
That’s totally at odds with the corporatists in congress. The best way out of this mess is if the executive and legislative branches lock horns and quibble for 2 years. With Pence at the helm, everything is fast-tracked. So I’ll take my chances with the mostly-unknown quantity.
This is my thinking as well. I think PJ O’Rourke said he was supporting Clinton because, even though he thought she was wrong about everything, she was wrong “within normal parameters.” I don’t share Pence’s politics, but I don’t think he’s as batshit insane as Trump.
It’s these kind of comments that have kept me posting here. lol (That cracked me up)
I went with Pence, but I’d rather drink bleach. Isn’t Pence already in charge of domestic and foreign policy?
+1. Also, Pences damage potential is mostly national. Trumphs catastrophe potential is global. Damage to the US social or economic fabric will also be easier to repair the more the rest of the west is ticking along.
I don’t like Pence at all but I still chose him because he hasn’t proven himself to be a habitual liar who threatens people who dare to speak against him.
Well, there’s also the chance that while the U.S. founders, the other westernized democracies will pick up the slack and emerge stronger as a result. I’m vaguely looking forward to Trump fucking up the U.S. enough that it becomes a net oil importer again, with Canada (a top ten exporter) getting richer in the process.
Add to that some of the educated immigrants the U.S. benefits from deciding to go to Canada instead because the U.S. has become less friendly to them… yeah, frankly, this could turn out to be a good few years for us, at your expense. Bring it, Yankee!